Ghouls Just Haunt to Have Fun (15 page)

“ ’Fraid so,” said Heath. “Mr. Knollenberg, I’m sorry to tell you this, but there might be a demon loose in your hotel.”

I stifled the groan that wanted to bubble up from my insides, as that wasn’t how I would have broken the news to the already beleaguered-looking GM. Sure enough, Murray turned as pale as one of the ghosties currently haunting his hotel. “A
demon
?” He gasped.

“We can’t be sure,” I said, giving Heath a pointed look. “But we were both attacked during the shoot—”

“What do you mean, you were
attacked
?!” Murray interrupted, and the poor guy looked as though he was ready to faint.

Heath pulled up the sleeve of his shirt and showed him the claw marks. Knollenberg’s mouth dropped in horror. “How did that happen? I mean, how is that even
possible
?”

Again Heath and I shared a look. I said, “We’re not sure, but we think it has something to do with one of the items brought to the set for Heath and me to give our impressions of. We’re on our way back there to make sure that we encase the object so that it can’t cause any more harm.”

“Damage?” Murray nearly shouted, his head swiveling back and forth between Heath and me. “What other damage did it cause?”

I held up my hand in a
take it easy
motion. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Everything is fine. The only damage was to us. We’ve got the knife temporarily contained under a covering that is holding the negative energy bound, and it should be fine until we can get it into this box.” I held up the box to show Knollenberg that we had things under control, but he hardly looked convinced.

“Oh, my,” he said, and, amazingly, his complexion seemed to lose even more color. Without another word he turned and began to trot off in the direction of the Renaissance Room.

“Great,” I moaned, nudging Heath as we hurried after him. “That’s all we need.”

We arrived at the conference room’s door just as Knollenberg was tugging it open, and before we could stop him he dashed into the room and we heard him shriek loud enough to wake the dead. (Sorry, but it was
that
loud!)

“Damn!” I swore, and leaped forward with Heath right next to me. We rushed in after the GM and stopped in our tracks, my mouth falling open far enough to expose my tonsils. “Holy mother of God!” I gasped, staring around the room in disbelief.

The place looked like someone with a machete had had himself a wild party. The curtains were torn into shreds of fabric; chairs were overturned and broken; shattered glass littered the floor; much of the camera crew’s equipment had been thrown around and, I suspected, damaged; holes were punched in the walls; and a giant carved heart was drawn around the antique mirror across the room. But most disturbing of all was the table in the center of the room, where the knife had once been covered with Gilley’s sweatshirt. All that remained of it were a few scraps of fabric and three long talon marks carved deeply into the tabletop.

While Heath and I took in the disarray of the room in silence, Knollenberg was holding his head in his hands and moaning about the cost of repairs.

Finally I turned to Heath and asked, “Why would Gopher leave all this expensive equipment here without posting a guard or locking the door?”

“Huh?” he said, pulling his eyes away from the table to look at me and focus on my question. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said that I don’t understand why the producer on this shoot would leave all of this valuable equipment here to be vandalized without securing the room. You’d think that a member of the crew would have been left behind to watch over this stuff, or at least make sure no one got in here.”

“You think a
person
did this?”

I glanced around at all the damage and felt my insides tighten at the prospect of facing something nonhuman that could cause so much destruction. “Well, someone human had to have come in here and removed the sweatshirt from the knife, at least,” I reasoned. “I mean, we had it contained as long as the shirt covered the knife.”

“But what if we didn’t?” said Heath. “What if we only stunned it or something?”

I thought on that, and as I did I walked forward to the table where we’d sat for the shoot earlier in the day and looked down at the tabletop. Tentatively I ran my fingers over the three talon marks etched deeply into the wood’s surface. Then I picked up the small shred of what was left of Gilley’s sweatshirt and examined it. Something curious occurred to me, and it was that I could clearly see that the magnets had been ripped off the fabric.

I glanced around the area, looking for the little black squares, but none appeared to be mixed in with all the debris. I then peered under the table, and there were no flat black squares to be found.

“What is it?” Heath asked when I stood up again and scratched my head.

“The magnets,” I said, lifting up the bit of fabric. “They’re all gone.”

Heath came over to me and inspected what was left of the sweatshirt. “Where’d they go?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But my theory is that someone knew about their power over spirit energy and ripped them off the sweatshirt, which likely gave the demon full rein to do whatever it wanted in here.”

There was a little squeak behind us, and I turned to see Knollenberg with his wide eyes and pale complexion staring at us in horror. “You mean to tell me that whatever did this to this room is roaming free in my hotel?”

Neither Heath nor I answered him right away, and I think our silence told him more than words could have, because the poor man simply covered his mouth and shook his head. “This is awful!” he said. “We can’t afford this! What am I supposed to tell our guests? I cannot expose them to this kind of danger!”

“I don’t think it’s time to panic just yet,” I said, surveying the room again and feeling a rather sick feeling settle into my stomach. “I know you’re worried about your hotel guests, but if you’ll give us just a few hours I think we can determine whether anyone is truly in danger. But first, we’ll need to find Gopher and let him know what’s happened. I’m sure he won’t be very happy to learn that some of his equipment’s been damaged, and I’ll ask him about why he left this room unattended. Then Heath and I will conduct a thorough search of the hotel—if there’s a violent poltergeist loose in this building, we’re the ones who will attract it first.”

“What will you do with it when you encounter it?” Knollenberg asked, and I saw how his eyes roved to the cigar box I held in my hands, which did seem a little pathetic against something powerful enough to destroy a large conference room.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” I reassured him, and I really hoped I sounded confident . . . ’cause that wasn’t at all how I felt. “For now, maybe you should have your staff alert you if anything out of the ordinary gets reported to the front desk. If anyone sees or hears anything unusual, come find one of us and we’ll go investigate.”

“But what if one of my guests is injured?” Knollenberg insisted, his eyes moving to Heath’s shoulder, where he knew there were deep cut marks.

I contemplated his predicament for a moment or two. The poor GM was damned if he listened to us, and damned if he didn’t. Finally, I shrugged my shoulders. “I understand this could put you in a very vulnerable situation. So I’ll leave it up to you. If you want to go ahead and evacuate your guests, then do what you and the hotel attorneys would be comfortable with. In the meantime, we’ll be on the hunt for this thing, and with any luck, we’ll find it before anyone else does.”

Knollenberg hardly looked reassured, and he muttered something about phoning the hotel’s owner to get his take on it before hurrying out of the room.

“Do you think that was the right call?” I asked Heath as we took one last look around the rubble of the Renaissance Room.

“M.J.,” Heath said soberly, “nothing about this thing feels right.”

And as an unexpected chill went up the back of my spine, I had to agree.

Chapter 7

We didn’t linger long in the Renaissance Room, deciding it was better to go find Gopher as soon as possible.

After stopping at the front desk to call the producer’s room and discovering that he didn’t answer the phone, I spotted Tracy, the production assistant, having a drink at the bar in the lobby.

I motioned to Heath and we walked over to her. “Hey, there,” I said to get her attention. “Have you seen Gopher?”

Tracy looked up at me, and her eyes appeared to struggle to focus. From the cluster of shot glasses next to the nearly empty bottle of beer she was downing, I could easily guess why. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen him.”

I waited, but Tracy didn’t seem as if she was going to put forth any more information unless I prodded her. “Can you tell me where?”

The young woman downed another shot of liquor before answering. “He’s upstairs,” she said with a sneer. “Humping his way through the production staff.”

I decided not to tell Tracy that was a little too much information for my taste and kept my questions on track. “Do you happen to know what room he’s in?”

Tracy swayed in her seat. “Why do you need to know, exactly?”

“Someone got into the Renaissance Room and vandalized some of the cameras and equipment. Gopher needs to be notified immediately.”

Tracy’s head wobbled on her thin neck as she swiveled to look in the direction of the conference room. “Where’s Mike?” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“The staff assistant,” she said. “He was left to watch over the room.”

I looked at Heath in alarm. We hadn’t seen anyone else in the room. “I have no idea,” I said, feeling a small pit of trepidation form in my stomach. “No one was in there when we looked.”

Even through her drunken haze Tracy seemed to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and she blinked several times before digging through her purse to retrieve her cell phone. Clicking through what I assumed was her contact list, she settled on one and put the phone to her ear. After a few more seconds she said, “Yo, Mikey, where the hell are you? I got the ghost lady here telling me that the room’s been wrecked. Call me back, pronto.”

Tracy then scrolled back through the contacts on her phone and punched the send button with a bit of flourish and a heck of a sneer. Putting the phone to her ear, she waited out the rings while her fingers drummed the bar. “Yo, asshole,” she said by way of a friendly greeting. “Maybe you can stop screwing Leslie long enough to get down here. Your equipment’s been vandalized and you’re on the hook for it, so I guess there
is
justice in the world!” With that she punched the end button and snickered before dropping her phone on the bar.

“I’m assuming that was Gopher?”

Tracy picked up her beer and took the last long gulp before giving me a winning smile, which I assumed was an affirmative. She then got up and teetered on her high heels before she announced, “I gotta pee. Watch my stuff, will you?” And without waiting for an answer she trooped off in a zigzag toward the restrooms.

We watched her totter away, and no sooner had she pushed through the door to the ladies’ room than her cell phone began to ring. I took the liberty of answering it, as the caller ID said it was Gopher. “What the hell kind of a message was that?!” yelled an angry voice the moment I said hello.

“If you’re looking for Tracy, she’s in the ladies’ room,” I replied calmly.

There was a pause, then, “Who is this?”

“M.J.,” I said. “And we need you down here right away, Gopher. The Renaissance Room has been vandalized, and a lot of your equipment has been wrecked.”

There was a flurry of profanity that followed, and I pulled the phone away from my ear. Placing my free hand over the receiver, I said quietly to Heath, “He seems upset.”

“What happened?” I heard after the rain of profanity had stopped.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But you need to get down here and take a look.”

“Where’s Mike?”

“We don’t know. When we went into the room no one was there.”

“What happened to the knife?”

I thought that was a rather odd question to ask. It just seemed out of place, but I replied with what I knew, which wasn’t much: “It’s gone.”

“Shit,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

I clicked off Tracy’s cell and tucked it back into her purse. “He’s coming down,” I told Heath.

 

Heath and I waited by the bar for Tracy to get back and for Gopher to show up. The bartender asked us if we’d like anything, and I ordered a Coke and Heath ordered a cappuccino. We talked a little bit about the disarray of the conference room, and I could tell that Heath was as nervous about going after the demon as I was. “This is just so far beyond anything I’ve ever encountered,” he was saying.

“I know,” I said, looking over my shoulder as we sat at the bar to see if Tracy had managed to come out of the ladies’ room yet. My eye fell instead on Gopher, who was just coming out of the elevator looking a bit rumpled, as though he’d dressed very quickly. Behind him and wearing a baseball cap was another young woman whom I thought I remembered being on the shoot that morning.

Gopher made a beeline for Heath and me, and when he got to us he said, “Did Mike show up?”

“No,” I said. “Was he supposed to?”

“Goddamn it!” Gopher swore. “I’ve been calling his cell every thirty seconds since I got off the phone with you. I keep getting his voice mail.”

“We haven’t seen him,” I said. “But the manager of the hotel is calling the police to file a report on the vandalism.”

“Is that thing still in there?” he asked, a bit nervously.

“You mean the demon?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“We didn’t see or feel anything in the room when we were there,” I said. “I think that whatever it was that caused the damage—be it demon or person—has left the area.”

“Okay, come on,” he said to us. “You guys might as well show me what happened.”